Mule Design Studio’s Blog: The Failure of Empathy

I went back for a second helping of Avatar this Sunday. There’s a scene early on in the movie where one of the scientists walks across the lab carrying the “mobile computer slab of the future.” We’ve seen one of these in almost every sci-fi movie of the last 50 years. It comes free with a jetpack, I suppose. Except this time, one month later, my 12 year old son turns to me and whispers “Look Dad, it’s an iPad.”

via weblog.muledesign.com

When I saw Avatar with my friend and colleague, Scott McDonald, the iPad hadn't been announced yet but we both looked at each other and had an unspoken, "that's what the iPad is going to be like" moment. I think, like Gruber noted in his post that, "Mike Monteiro gets it."

3 thoughts on “Mule Design Studio’s Blog: The Failure of Empathy

  1. Yip, I have 2 messagepads a 100 & a 150. I ran a usability study of them back in the early 90s at National Geographic. I also have a TSR-80 portable that we used to send out to the field for the writers.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_100
    It is kind of funny to hear how an iPad would be inadequate for a task when we used to do business on a machine with an “Eight line, forty characters LCD with 240 by 64 pixel addressable graphics.” 😉

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.